Articles & Stories

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Upgraded sawmill eliminates an entire production step for an Indonesian Company

Near Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia there are many sawmills processing wood for export. Wood-Mizer’s agent in East Java, Richard Soegitanto has been helping supply and service Wood-Mizer sawmills in the region for many years.

At a sawmill in Gresik, the company is producing a lot of merbau timber using one LT15 sawmill. “The company is producing door jambs and exporting to China and India. They cut mostly merbau timber and also some mahogany."

"They are really happy with the LT15’s performance,” Richard said. “Especially with the surface quality. In a few months, they will have a total of four Wood-Mizer machines. Three LT15s, and one LX100 sawmill.”

“In Indonesia, and especially in Surabaya, sawmillers are still using vertical bandsaws,” Richard Soegitanto said. “The narrowband horizontal sawmill is not as common here. But when it comes to precision and recovery, the narrowband is better…and the recovery is much, much higher.”

“Timber is getting more expensive. We have a lot of customers who are cutting teak, merbau, and Indonesian rosewood – which are all expensive timbers. So they want to make sure that every cut saves as much timber as possible.”

“With the narrowband LT15 sawmill, this company is able to produce 3.5 cubic meters of timber per shift. They run it 24 hours a day for three shifts, so 10 cubic meters plus. The sawmill does not stop.”

“Before having the LT15, they used a vertical bandsaw. After the bandsaw cut the timber, they had to run the timber through a double-planer before it went on to be moulded into the final profile.”

But that all changed with the Wood-Mizer.

“Traditional vertical sawmills have a tolerance of around 3mm, so they have to be double-planed before they are moulded. But the Wood-Mizer has a tolerance of only 1mm and better surface quality.”

Because of the precision and surface quality achieved with the LT15, the timber is able to skip the double-planer and go straight to the moulder. The quality of the timber allows them to skip a whole processing step.

Also recovery is an important factor - “With Wood-Mizer, they have a thin-kerf cut of around 2 mm. Using a vertical bandsaw, the waste is around 3.5mm. So in every cut they are making more profit by using Wood-Mizer.”

And what about blades? Fortunately, specialized narrowband blades are available from Wood-Mizer to successfully cut Indonesia’s hardwoods.

“We use a Wood-Mizer RazorTIP Carbide blade here to cut the merabu, because it’s so hard. The Carbide-tipped teeth allows us to cut the hardwood and produce a nice surface finish. They will use one RazorTIP bandsaw blade around 10 to 15 times between sharpenings.”

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